Well here are the top 10 reasons, and today for the first time, I noticed that in Firefox 3 they have made the location bar even more robust. A little bit of story before I show the screen-shot… my 2 year old really likes some web pages, specially this one… Abracadabra. Today, she asked me to play this song, and unfortunately I didn’t have it bookmarked. Now… if you have dealt with tantrum-throwing 2 year olds, you would realize how time could be of importance. She was on the verge of getting... [More]

If you are a IIS web server administrator who is responsible for fine tuning the performance of the web server, the chances of you having to make registry changes or Metabase changes are very high. Most of these changes are usually recommendations by msdn or knowledge base articles at http://support.microsoft.com . When these articles are not followed "as is"  or incorrectly followed, this can have fatal consequences for applications running on IIS. I recently worked on an issue where brow... [More]

There are no surprises (for me, at least!) that Firefox has been downloaded more than 14 million times in just 7 days!!! I am a die-hard fan of Firefox since quite a few years, and I have experienced it getting better and better over the last few years. Today, in this post, I will share some of the tips and tricks which I personally just can't do without. In fact, they are probably the biggest reason why I love and use Firefox in the first place. 1. First things first... faster browsing! Type... [More]

One of the things I am really annoyed about is the finally block of the famous trio.... try/catch/finally. Before I get into details, let me explain that I really like the finally block. It has a nice sound to it and of course it does a damn good job, it acts as a placeholder where we can clean up resources. Now if you check out best practices and on exception handling, its strongly recommended that programmers should use the finally block. So here is why I am bit ticked off by the finally block... [More]

In this scrap, I am sharing a project using which you can send PDF files to the IE Client in four different ways. Create a new C# Website. While creating the following pages ensure that you DON'T have "Place code in Separate file" checkbox as checked. You need to create 4 pages called "Way1.aspx", "Way2.aspx", "Way3.aspx" and "PDFContainer.aspx" without a code behind. So the four different ways which I was talking about is as follows... 1) Y... [More]

If you work with a lot of samples, the chances are quite likely that you will end up in a rather dirty list of Recent Projects List in Visual Studio. I'm personally quite nit-picky and I really hate it when I find something like this... Now... I don't know which of these Samples should I click on (since I have two in the list!). Anyway, there are multiple reasons why you would like to remove the junk entries from this list. One way is to open the Registry and navigate... [More]

Recently I was working on some code where it was required to open a file, write something to it and close it. I ran into a small problem while considering the code. Since this was a Doc file the problem was that how do I check if the file was already open or not?  If the file is already open for editing by some other user, how do I write to it? Like all good programmers I looked around for a code sample on the Internet, although I found some great examples on the net, I didn't find a good C... [More]

I have already shown how to use .NET reflection to get the information about all the colors in .NET. Let's say you want to check out how a specific colored font would appear on any background, you may like to check this sample. Use the code which follows to get an output like the one below. There are various ways to get this output, but I guess this code is pretty small and will show you some of the things that you could do with System.Reflection in .NET. Here is the code... <%@ ... [More]

The client had developed an AJAX based ASP.NET 2.0 web application which had been deployed to multiple IIS 6.0 servers. On only one particular server they noticed that the application does not perform as expected. It works for a few hours and then starts to fail with the following error logged in event log. The only way to recover from the problem is to reboot the server whenever the issue occurs. Exception Type:System.Web.HttpException The remote host closed the connection. The error c... [More]

There are times when you want to incorporate a picture, a large piece of code in a limited web space... ex. a blog post which has a lot of <DIV> tags. Now, to crop or resize the picture may not be the option always. I still see a lot posts where the images are either cropped or line breaks are introduced into the code. The problem with the line break is that it increases the overhead and time spent on the blogger's part in formatting the post. Apart from that, it also creates chances of t... [More]